The Middle of Everywhere (2 page)

Today the park employees were friendly. We had all the fresh water and food we needed. People were clean, polite, well-rested and well-clothed. Jugglers entertained us. Still, children cried as they grew tired and thirsty, and old people looked for places to sit. All of us, wandering around or standing in lines, created a resonance with the past.

As we explored Ellis Island I remembered a trip I'd made with my husband, Jim. It took thirty-six hours to fly home to Lincoln, Nebraska, from Chiang Mai, Thailand, and on the way we'd stopped in Bangkok, Tokyo, and Chicago. We took our picture in each of the airports. At Chiang Mai we were fresh, alert, and smiling. By Lincoln, we had rumpled stained clothes, bags under our eyes, and spaced-out expressions. If we looked like this after thirty-six hours of business-class travel, what must have become of people in steerage for three weeks crossing the North Adantic?

Jane and I walked first to an exhibit of languages, a tree whose branches were countries and whose leaves were words. On the Spanish branch hung the words
VAMOOSE
and
HOOSGOW;
on the Yiddish,
KLUTZ
and
NUDNIK
; on the German,
OUCH
and
CATALPA
; on the West African,
JUKEBOX
and
BANJO
; on the Chinese
GUNG HO
; and on the French,
PUMPKIN
and one of our most beautiful words,
PRAIRIE.

We joined a tour. The historian asked if we were from immigrant families. Most hands went up and he gently chided the others: "Unless you are full Native American, you are the child of immigrants," He added that the people on the
Mayflower who
landed at Plymouth Rock were our first "boat people." He said 40 percent of all Americans could trace their roots to Ellis Island. At its peak, the island was bigger than many towns in Europe, and some immigrants thought that Ellis Island was New York City.

The rich didn't come through Ellis Island; they were met on the boats by customs officials and doctors who allowed them to disembark in Manhattan. The poor immigrants were mostly Italian, Caribbean, or Russian. Many had never seen electricity and were afraid of people in uniforms. The food confused them. One woman thought spaghetti was worms. Some children, seeing bananas for the first time, ate them with the skins on.

The immigrants had just crossed three thousand miles of ocean and were sick and broke. They had come to escape racial or religious persecution or because they'd heard the streets of America were paved with gold. One immigrant later said, "There were few streets, no gold, and I did most of the paving."

As the immigrants walked in, those who looked ill were chalked by doctors for later exams. Officials asked each immigrant twenty-nine questions designed to see if they were prostitutes, bigamists, or criminals. People who were mentally ill, had communicable diseases, or were likely to need welfare were not allowed in. Names often were Americanized. Schmidt became Smith, Johannsen became Johnson. Only after passing the medical tests were those immigrants who had the proper papers and twenty-five dollars admitted. One man said, "I'm not going to be afraid of the gates of hell, I've been to Ellis Island."

With five thousand to seven thousand people admitted per day, the processing was hurried and fraught with misunderstandings. One young man tried to say he was going to Houston (pronounced
Howston
) Street, where his family waited. The officer thought he meant the city of Houston and put him on a train to Texas. He went to Houston and never saw his family again.

Most newcomers left the island for New York City, but those riding the railroad went to New Jersey. Recently there has been a dispute over whether New York or New Jersey owns Ellis Island. Appearing in court on behalf of New York, Mayor Giuliani argued, "No one ever set out from the old world for Jersey City."

All morning Jane and I looked at names, faces, and objects. Edward G. Robinson, Irving Berlin, A1 Capone, and Felix Frankfurter all came through Ellis Island. However, we were most interested in the ordinary people, tired, frightened, and yet hopeful. We walked past black-and-white photos of Finns, Czechs, Jamaicans, Byelorussians, and shell-shocked Armenians, the lucky ones who escaped being burned alive in their own country. We smiled at the photos of a Japanese woman with wooden slippers, a stylish Greek girl, and a Russian poet in a fur cap. People had brought over leather-bound books, carved wooden spoons, a mandolin, and a yellowing lace baby cap. We examined wildly impractical shoes—Chinese jeweled moccasins and a pair of black Turkish sandals decorated with blue feathers.

At lunch, we sat outside under the sycamores. Near us, an Indian mother breast-fed her baby, a Latino family in starchy new clothes shared tortillas and rice, and an old couple spoke Italian as they fed the birds. Jane talked about her grandmother who had carried her mother, an infant, in this place. Orphaned in the flu epidemic, Jane's mother had raised her little sisters in poverty in a slum on the Lower East Side.

Our hearts and eyes were full. We headed back to our boat, back toward Manhattan for a sushi dinner. We sailed past the Statue of Liberty, aka Eleanor Roosevelt. When we arrived at Battery Park, we maneuvered through the sea of hawkers. Men from the Caribbean, West Africa, and Southeast Asia sold watches, Ellis Island T-shirts, snow cones, and hot dogs. An East Indian displayed his charmed cobra. One of the salesmen wore a shirt that quoted John Lennon, "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

Ellis Island had always welcomed dreamers. Jane's relatives and mine had dreamed the dream and so most likely did your relatives. America was freedom, the land of opportunity, and the promised land. And the dreams of our ancestors are the dreams of our Kurdish, Vietnamese, Sudanese, Afghani, and other newcomers today. Gold Mountain is Silicon Valley. The land of milk and honey is our land of Coke and french fries. America is where the streets are lined with compact discs and SUVs. We have free schools and free people. Everybody has a dream in America.

I AM FROM

I am from Avis and Frank, Agnes and Fred, Glessie May and Mark.

From the Ozark Mountains and the high plains of Eastern Colorado,

From mountain snowmelt and lazy southern creeks filled with water moccasins.

I am from oatmeal eaters, gizzard eaters, haggis and raccoon eaters.

I'm from craziness, darkness, sensuality, and humor.

From intense do-gooders struggling through ranch winters in the 1920s.

I'm from "If you can't say anything nice about someone don't say anything" and "Pretty is as pretty does" and "Shit-mucklety brown" and "Damn it all to hell."

I'm from no-dancing-or-drinking Methodists, but cards were okay except on Sunday, and from tent-meeting Holy Rollers,

From farmers, soldiers, bootleggers, and teachers.

I'm from Schwinn girl's bike, 1950 Mercury two-door, and
West Side Story.
I'm from coyotes, baby field mice, chlorinous swimming pools,
Milky Way and harvest moon over Nebraska cornfields.
I'm from muddy Platte and Republican,
from cottonwood and mulberry, tumbleweed and switchgrass
from Willa Cather, Walt Whitman, and Janis Joplin,
My own sweet dance unfolding against a cast of women in aprons and barefoot men in overalls.

As a girl in Beaver City, I played the globe game. Sitting outside in the thick yellow weeds, or at the kitchen table while my father made bean soup, I would shut my eyes, put my finger on the globe, and spin it. Then I would open my eyes and imagine what it was like in whatever spot my finger was touching. What were the streets like, the sounds, the colors, the smells? What were the people doing there right now?

I felt isolated in Beaver City, far away from any real action. We were a small town of white Protestants surrounded by cow pastures and wheat fields. I had no contact with people who were different from me. Native Americans had a rich legacy in Nebraska, but I knew nothing of them, not even the names of the tribes who lived in my area. I had never seen a black person or a Latino. Until I read
The Diary of Anne Frank,
I had never heard of Jewish people.

Adults talked mostly about crops, pie, and rainfall. I couldn't wait to grow up and move someplace exotic and faraway, and living where I did, every place appeared faraway and exotic. When I read Tolstoy's book on the little pilgrim who walked all over the world, I vowed to become that pilgrim and to spend my life seeing everything and talking to everyone.

As a young adult, I escaped for a while. I lived in San Francisco, Mexico, London, and Madrid. But much to my surprise, I missed the wheat fields, the thunderstorms, and the meadowlarks. I returned to Nebraska in my mid-twenties, married, raised a family, worked as a psychologist, and ate a lot of pie. I've been happy in Nebraska, but until recently I thought I had to choose between loving a particular rural place and experiencing all the beautiful diversity of the world.

Before the Europeans arrived, Nebraska was home to many Indian tribes. The Omaha, the Ponca, the Pawnee, and the Nemaha lived in the east, the Lakota Sioux in the west. In the late 1800s immigrants from Europe pushed out the Native Americans. Wave after wave of new pioneers broke over Nebraska and we became a state of Scots, Irish, British, Czechs, Swedes, and Danes. For a while, we had so many Germans that many schools held classes in German. But after World War I, when nativist sentiments swept our state, our unicameral made instruction in German illegal.

Mexican workers came to build the railroads and to work on farms and in meatpacking. African Americans came to farm and to work in our cities. Nebraska's first free black person, Sally Bayne, moved to Omaha in 1854, and an all-black colony was formed at Overton in Dawes County in 1885. Malcolm X was born in Omaha in 1925.

Even though people of color have a rich history in our state and, of course, the Native Americans were here first, our state's identity the last 150 years has been mainly European. Until recently, a mixed marriage meant a Catholic married to a Methodist. After World War II, so many Latvians came here that We became the official site of the Latvian government in exile. Our jokes were yawners about farmers or Lutherans—"What did the firmer say after he won a million dollars in the lottery?" "Thank God I have enough money to firm a few more years." Or, "Wherever four Lutherans are gathered there is always a fifth."

However, in the last fifteen years something surprising has happened. It began with the boat people, mostly Vietnamese and Cambodians, coming in after the Vietnam War. In the 1980s Lincoln began having a few Asian markets, a Vietnamese Catholic church, a Buddhist temple, and English Language Learners (ELL) classes. Around the same time, Mexican migrant workers, who had long done seasonal work in our area, bought houses and settled down. Refugees from the wars in Central America trickled in.

The real change occurred in the 1990s. Because Lincoln had almost no unemployment and a relatively low cost of living, we were selected by the U. S. Office of Refugee Resettlement as a preferred community for newly arrived refugees. Now we are one of the top-twenty cities in America for new arrivals from abroad. Our nonwhite population has grown 128 percent since 1990. We are beginning to look like East Harlem.

Suddenly, our supermarkets and schools are bursting with refugees from Russia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, and Ethiopia. Our Kurdish, Sudanese, and Somali populations are rapidly increasing. Even as I write this, refugees from Afghanistan, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are coming into our community. Some are educated and from Westernized places. Increasingly, we have poor and uneducated refugees. We have children from fifty different nationalities who speak thirty-two different languages in our public schools.

Our obituary column shows who came here early in the 1900s. It is filled with Hrdvys, Andersens, Walenshenksys, and Muellers. But the births column, which reflects recent immigration patterns, has many Ali, Nguyen, and Martinez babies. By midcentury, less than half our population will be non-Latino white. We are becoming a brown state in a brown nation.

Lincoln has often been described by disgruntled locals and insensitive outsiders as the middle of nowhere, but now it can truthfully be called the middle of everywhere. We are a city of juxtapositions. Next to the old man in overalls selling sweet corn at the farmers' market, a Vietnamese couple sells long beans, bitter melons, and fresh lemongrass. A Yemeni girl wearing a veil stands next to a football fan in his Big Red jacket. Beside McDonald's is a Vietnamese karaoke bar. Wagey Drug has a sign in the window that says,
TARJETAS EN ESPAÑOL SE VENDEN AQUI.
On the Fourth of July, Asian lion dancers perform beside Nigerian drummers. Driving down Twenty-seventh Street, among the signs for the Good Neighbor Center, Long John Silver's, Fat Pat's Pizza, Snowflakes, and Jiffy Lube, I see signs for Mohammed's Barber Shop, Jai Jai's Hair Salon, Kim Ngo's jewelry, Pho's Vietnamese Cafe, and Nguyen's Tae-Kwon Do.

We celebrate many holidays—Tet, Cinco de Mayo, Rosh Hashanah, and Ramadan. At our jazz concerts, Vietnamese families share benches with Kurdish and Somali families. When my neighbor plays a pickup basketball game in the park, he plays with Bosnian, Iranian, Nigerian, and Latino players. I am reminded of the
New Yorker
cartoon which pictured a restaurant with a sign reading,
RANCHO IL WOK DE PARIS, FEATURING TEX-MEX, ITALIAN, ASIAN, AND FRENCH CUISINES.

Women in veils exchange information with Mexican grandmothers in long black dresses. Laotian fathers smoke beside Romanian and Serbian dads. By now, every conceivable kind of grocery store exists in our city. And the ethnic shelves in our IGA grocery stores keep expanding. The produce sections carry jicama and cilantro. Shoppers can buy pitas, tortillas, egg rolls, wraps, and breads from all over the world. My most recent cab driver was a Nigerian school administrator who fled his country because he was in a pro-democracy group. S. J. Perelman's description of Bangkok—"It seemed to combine the Hannibal, Missouri, of Mark Twain's childhood with Beverly Hills, the Low Countries, and Chinatown"—could now apply to Lincoln.